By DAPHNE MERKIN

ow in the world, you may find yourself thinking, can the delicate but overarticulated psyche of Virginia Woolf withstand yet another exhumation? Can there possibly be any gold left to extract from the overmined precincts of Bloomsbury, where Virginia and Vanessa and Leonard and Clive and Duncan and Morgan and Maynard and Lytton moved about with an avid sense of post-Victorian newness, joining in clannish and often churlish and virulently self-documented discourse? It is an oft-told story, gripping in its details: the beautiful but remote mother who died when Virginia was 13; the father grunting away at his literary labors, inconsolable in his grief; the sexual advances of her half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth; the early breakdowns; the rivalry with her sister, Vanessa; the marriage to the ''penniless Jew,'' Leonard; the intense friendships with other women, including lesbian affairs with Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth; and then her suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.

As Hermione Lee, a professor of English literature at Liverpool University and the author of a biography of Willa Cather, notes, Virginia Woolf's ''status has grown beyond anything that even she, with her strong sense of her own achievements, might have imagined.'' The greater a writer's status, the more likely he or she will be appropriated by others: given the sheer volume of material that's been produced about Woolf -- all those books, articles and scholarly papers, not to mention memoirs, letters, diaries and psychoanalytic readings -- is there anything vital left to say? This question is raised by Hermione Lee herself (''periodic attacks of archive-faintness overcame me'') and must inevitably occur to even the most ardent of Bloomsbury/Woolf fans when faced with this rather hefty volume. One hesitates to commit oneself, wondering whether the time put in will have been worth it at the end, a bit ashamed of this cost-accounting approach but wary nonetheless.

Virginia Woolf had very mixed feelings about biography, or ''life-writing,'' as she called it. On the one hand she was an enthusiast: ''As everybody knows,'' she wrote in her essay on Christina Rossetti, ''the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible.'' But, as Ms. Lee points out in the opening chapter of her remarkable new book, she also declared biography to be ''a bastard, an impure art'' and claimed that the very idea was ''poppycock.'' Objecting to ''the draperies and decencies'' of the Victorian approach, she still had qualms about ''the new biography'' as practiced by her good friend Lytton Strachey. She argued within her own work ''about the rival merits of archival and imaginative research,'' and eventually wrote fictional biographies (''Orlando,'' ''Flush'') as well as a real one (''Roger Fry''). Throughout her life Woolf pondered the silence of her own sex when it came to autobiography; always fascinated by ''the gap between the outer self ('the fictitious V.W. whom I carry like a mask about the world') and the secret self,'' she intended to write her own life from her diaries. Still, with ''her perpetual fear of egotistical self-exposure'' (an inhibition that began in the merciless teasing of her childhood and ripened in the preening atmosphere of Bloomsbury's Memoir Club), it is unlikely she would have risked being truly forthcoming when being ''fearfully brilliant'' would do.

Ms. Lee documents the evolving perception of her subject from ''the delicate lady authoress of a few experimental novels and sketches, some essays and a 'writer's' diary, to one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language.'' She does this without recourse to the politicized agendas of the academy or special pleading (all of Woolf's flaws are on display here); this account sets itself above the fray, the better to home in on the glittery and elusive creature at its center -- the prize catch in what one critic has described as the Bloomsbury pond.

From its very first page Ms. Lee's book is informed by current thinking on how to approach the writing of someone's life: ''There is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made.'' But it is also infused with a very personal passion for her subject, which enables the author to cut crisply through the labyrinth of theories that have sprung up: there is ''no way of knowing,'' she asserts, whether the teen-age Virginia Stephen was really violated, ''forced to have oral sex'' -- or, indeed, any kind of sex. What we get instead of reductionist speculation -- Virginia Woolf as incest survivor or proto-feminist or trailblazing post-modernist -- is a vivid picture of an age in flux and the pressures, internal as well as external, that it brought to bear upon one particularly sensitive female. Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, into an Edwardian world of water closets and silver salvers filled with visiting cards, a world without electric lighting. During her childhood there were still some households that kept carriages ''with a coachman and footman who wore powdered wigs, and yellow plush knee breeches and silk stockings''; when she and her half sister, Stella, took a walk in Kensington Gardens they sometimes bumped into Henry James. As late as 1904, when a 22-year-old Virginia was living with her three siblings in what her parents' generation regarded as a bohemian, if not declasse, setup at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury (''Henry James was particularly aghast''), bathroom references were still cause for embarrassment. In 1917, observing the freedom in matters of attire and sexual preference enjoyed by her new women friends, like Katherine Mansfield and Dora Carrington, she could note, ''It seems to me quite impossible to wear trousers.'' In 1927 a cheroot-smoking Virginia Woolf would shingle her hair, and in the summer of 1934 she switched from an old-fashioned nib to a fountain pen. In 1939, light-years away from her cloistered beginnings, she met Freud, who presented her with a narcissus.

Ms. Lee renders this world, in which change was both slow in coming and shocking in its effect, with technically inventive moments, such as the one early in the book in which she recounts a visit the four young orphaned Stephens paid to their beloved childhood summer house and moves brilliantly from a freeze-framed scene to real time, using ''To the Lighthouse'' as a referent: ''Like Lily Briscoe conjuring up Mrs. Ramsay, we can superimpose, on to the image of the four young Stephens standing outside the hedge in the dusk, the image of summers of 20 years before. We can take the ghosts, turning them back into children, through the escallonia hedge . . . and back into the 1880's. The sun comes out, the house and garden are full of children and adults in Victorian clothes -- family, visitors -- walking and playing cricket and picking flowers and talking and reading. Julia Stephen is sitting there, casting her shadow on the step.'' She skillfully links the gradual rescripting of the ''old laws'' with the developments in Virginia Woolf's sense of herself and her writing, enabling us to see how the modernist refashioning of culture influenced her creative vision and helped her begin to untangle the problem of ''how to present intellectual argument in the form of art.''

This biographer also makes judicious use of psychological conjecture; by keeping a careful distance from jargon-ridden speculations (''But do we need . . . to put Virginia Woolf on the couch and make more sense of her than she can make of herself?'') and by maintaining a certain modesty before the irreducible nature of her subject, Ms. Lee comes across as immensely insightful without appearing to have all the answers at hand. Of Woolf's parents, for instance, she remarks: ''They both died before she had begun to prove herself as a writer, but it is probable that her writer's life was driven by the desire to say 'look at me!' to those two exceptional and critical parents.''

Ms. Lee is good, as well, on the crucial role of Leonard -- this man who seemed ''so foreign'' to his wife-to-be even as she is only months away from marrying him and who eventually became her truest companion. In the legend that has grown up around Virginia Woolf, Leonard features as a grim head nurse of a husband, ceaselessly gauging his wife's symptoms and doling out the amount of time she may spend chatting with visitors. Ms. Lee does not deny this side of him, conceding that Leonard's vigilant supervision of his wife's social life ''certainly turned him, over the years, into more of a guardian than a lover,'' but he takes on fuller form here than he has elsewhere, exhibiting ambitions and judgments of his own -- not only in the arena of politics, where Virginia favored pacifism in the face of the mounting threat from Hitler and Leonard favored going to war, but also when it came to people and literature. (Leonard was bored by much of Bloomsbury's partying; found Ethel Smyth, the eccentric 72-year-old composer with whom his 48-year-old wife fell briefly in love, ''appalling''; and thought ''Three Guineas'' his wife's worst book.) And although it has become de rigueur to treat the Woolfs' marriage as a sexless union of highbrows, the one sober and the other mad, this is the first biography I have read that succeeds, through a subtle shift in emphasis, in conveying the profoundly intimate quality of their relationship -- the way Virginia felt about Leonard's presence of an evening when they both read quietly, ''L in his stall, I in mine.'' Ms. Lee subverts the established view still further by suggesting that, at least in the beginning, as evidenced by the playful use of pet names (Virginia was often ''Mandril'' and Leonard ''Mongoose'') and general indulgence in what Virginia called ''private fun,'' the Woolfs' marriage had a cuddly, even frisky aspect -- ''an erotic secret life.'' (Another recent biography, ''Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf,'' by Panthea Reid, while not nearly as strong as Ms. Lee's, makes fascinating use of documents that are either unfamiliar or heretofore unpublished. So we fall upon a startlingly sexy note written by Virginia to Leonard a year and a half after their marriage, in which the Mandril ''wishes me to inform you delicately that her flanks and rump are now in finest plumage, and invites you to an exhibition.'' Virginia when she sizzles sounds very hot indeed!)

Of the many original ideas that Ms. Lee takes up, the place of reading in Virginia Woolf's life and the meaning of her madness are especially well developed. Although Woolf's was too mocking a sensibility to give itself over to the Pateresque view of art as a form of religion, she clearly found solace -- a way out from her overwhelming sense of futility, ''the old treadmill feeling of going on and on and on, for no reason'' -- in the ordering properties of reading and writing. Reading became for her, as Ms. Lee describes it, a means ''of transcending the self.'' (She wrote to Ethel Smyth, ''Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.'') As for Woolf's psychological frailty -- ''my own queer, difficult nervous system'' -- Hermione Lee makes a persuasive case for her underlying sanity and for the literary use to which she put the epiphanies revealed to her in her breakdowns. Notwithstanding her ''blue devils,'' which was her term for depression, and the agitations of her manic phases, she nurtured a hard-won affirmative instinct. She admitted to a ''terror of real life'' and a general thin-skinnedness -- ''Cut me anywhere, & I bleed too profusely'' -- and by her own recognition she descended from an overbred, attenuated race: ''such cold fingers, so fastidious, so critical, such taste. My madness has saved me.''

And perhaps, indeed, it did. As she aged, she seems never to have succumbed to middle-aged prejudices; she remained porous in a way creative people are often imagined to be but rarely are. Although it may seem odd to say of someone who killed herself (she put a stone in a pocket and walked into the Ouse River) that she was heroic, it is all the same the word that one most associates with Virginia Woolf after reading Ms. Lee's biography. She ceaselessly challenged herself in her art, always giving ''this loose, drifting material of life'' her best imaginative capacities. Her courage in questioning the manifold smug assumptions of the patriarchal culture in which she lived -- ranging from its educational system (she felt a particular disdain for masculine vanity as personified by Oxbridge dons and turned down several honorary degrees) to the way it waged war -- is easy to overlook because of the subtlety and whimsy of her methods. But it is all the more striking when one considers that she might have comfortably inhabited the privileged niche she had within that culture (T. S. Eliot called it ''a kind of hereditary position in English letters'') without rocking the boat.

Hermione Lee has written a discerning and utterly absorbing account of the cost of female genius and the interplay of the forces that shape an individual life (as well as the perception of that life). Although her biography has not uncovered any startling new facts, Ms. Lee's tone and level of interpretation are such that she has performed the impossible: she has rescued Virginia Woolf from her iconic standing and restored her to human dimensions. We come to see her as she really was, unabashedly snobbish (she found Joyce's ''Ulysses'' ''underbred, the work of a self-taught working man'') and unremittingly envious -- she was always snapping at the heels of other people's self-regard -- yet also luminous and tender and generous, the person you would most like to see coming down the path.

I wish that the extensive notes were less confusingly organized, and I would like to have heard a bit more, given the capaciousness of this work, about the fluctuations in Virginia Woolf's reputation. Although she is today firmly ensconced in the canon, she would have been a dubious literary bet at any number of historical moments in the last half-century. There were always those, like the critic Raymond Mortimer, who thought she had the ''Midas touch'' as a writer -- ''every word she uses is alive and pulling like a trout on a line'' -- but the Leavisite assault on Bloomsbury and its ethos began a period of diminishment as early as the 30's; Queenie Leavis liked to refer to Virginia Woolf as ''the clever daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen,'' as if she were describing an unusually articulate debutante. And there is something about her writing -- its lack of rigid ego boundaries and blurring of subject-object distinctions as manifested by the fluid plot lines and evasion of authorial omniscience -- that has consistently threatened a certain kind of male reader, from Erich Auerbach (who noted in ''Mimesis'' that she ''does not seem to bear in mind that she is the author and hence ought to know how matters stand with her characters'') to John Bayley (whose censorious essay some years ago rapped her on her knuckles for her competitiveness and lack of a ''sense of moral order,'' only to allow that ''she might have grown up in her last years and moved us in the more considered ways that older writers do'') to, more recently, David Denby in ''Great Books.''

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Everyone and no one, it seems. Meanwhile we have a book worthy of its subject -- graceful, astonishingly well researched, yet imbued with a sense of flow that is rarely achieved at this level of scholarship. Brimming with intelligence and excitement, it sets before us the idea of an electric mind, of indisputable greatness. Virginia Woolf thought the biographer had to go ''ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality and the presence of obsolete conventions.'' Here, then, is that miner's canary -- just listen.

Daphne Merkin's essay collection, ''Dreaming of Hitler: Passions and Provocations,'' has just been published.

More on Virginia WoolfFrom the Archives of The New York Times

An Oldster Enters a Protest (March 10, 1923), an extraordinary editorial: "If [Jacob's Room] is a masterpiece as its admirers say...then the once admitted beauties and merits of all the classics, old and older, are the delusions of ignorance...If this sort of thing doesn't indicate degeneration and perversion, what does it indicate?"

Review of "The Voyage Out" (1920): "There is little in this offering to make it stand out from the ruck of mediocre novels which make far less literary pretension....The Voyage Out is announced as a first novel....With the cleverness shown here, crude as most of it is, there should be a possibility of something worth while from the same pen in the future."